http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
IN a year with few political contests, the Republican primary
for governor of New Jersey is a fun fight to watch. Any GOP
voter who has ever voted in a primary has found his mailbox
stuffed with luridly colored mailings crammed with
high-voltage rhetoric accusing Bret Schundler, Bob Franks or
both of being either duplicitous or a tax hiker. The joke in
political circles is that you better not go on vacation before
the June 26 primary or your mailbox will overflow.

The debates between Mr. Schundler, the mayor of Jersey
City, and Mr. Franks, the former congressman and last year's
Senate nominee, have been equally heated. (The last one
airs on C-Span tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern.) On Monday the
two candidates met in the studios of WABC, a New York
talk-radio station, for an hour-long debate. During the
commercial breaks, host Sean Hannity noticed that the two
men were "barely talking" to each other. Their silence was so
palpable that he brought it up on the air. "This is becoming a
very contentious race," he said. "I just sense there is some
animosity."

The Republican-controlled Legislature delayed this year's
primary by three weeks after Don DiFrancesco--who became
acting governor when Christine Whitman left the statehouse
for the Environmental Protection Agency--dropped out of the
race amid ethics charges. The GOP establishment, long at
odds with the conservative Mayor Schundler, recruited Mr.
Franks from a lucrative job he had just landed as a
Washington lobbyist to replace Mr. DiFrancesco as their
candidate. Legislators also allowed Mr. DiFrancesco to
transfer much of his campaign money to Mr. Franks.

Ever since then the conventional wisdom has been that Mr.
Franks, who last year came within three percentage points
of defeating the self-financed candidacy of multimillionaire
Democrat Jon Corzine for U.S. Senate, was a prohibitive
favorite. He had name recognition left over from his David
vs. Goliath race against Mr. Corzine, a moderate eight-year
voting record in Congress, and as a former state party
chairman the loyalty of "the boys and girls," the 20,000 or so
party regulars who derive some or all of their income or
prestige from state government.

Mr. Schundler, on the other hand, has long been a thorn in
the side of the party establishment, which views him as a
windy iconoclast with eccentric conservative ideas. "The
Jack Kemp of New Jersey," one county chairman calls him,
and he didn't mean it as a compliment.

But recent polls show a tightening race, with the Franks lead
falling from some 15 points down to as little as five in a
Public Opinion Strategies survey taken for the Schundler
campaign. "The momentum and enthusiasm in favor of
Schundler is there," says Al Felzenberg, a political scientist
from New Jersey now at the Heritage Foundation.

In addition, the backing of the party machinery may not be
worth as much in a late June primary, when many voters are
at the beach and there is no tradition of turning out a lot of
absentee votes. "I don't think the party hacks can fully trust
their own people to vote for Franks," says Rick Shaftan, a
pollster who has often been critical of Mr. Schundler's
abilities as a candidate. "The more they learn about Franks,
the less there is to be excited about."

Mr. Shaftan says he also questions Mr. Franks's decision to
participate in debates on Mr. Hannity's radio show. "The
ratings of that show are big and the audience is
conservative," he notes. "All Franks did was allow Schundler
to expose his record as not being very conservative. I give
Schundler an A-plus for digging into Franks and never letting
go." (OpinionJournal readers from outside the New York area
may know Mr. Hannity as the conservative co-host of Fox
News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes" debate show.)

No doubt tonight's debate will be equally contentious and
the issue of who is misrepresenting whom is likely to come
up. Mr. Franks has claimed in his mailers that property taxes
have gone up 79% during Mr. Schundler's eight-year tenure
in Jersey City. The New York Times has concluded that such
claims have "not stood up to close scrutiny."

On the other hand, the Schundler camp constantly pairs Mr.
Franks in photos with Jim Florio, the Democratic governor
Ms. Whitman defeated in 1993. As GOP state party chairman
at the time of Mr. Florio's infamous 1990 tax increases, Mr.
Franks clearly was no Florio friend. A fairer criticism would be
that Mr. Franks's current support for allowing voters the
right to put initiatives on the ballot is undercut by his failure
to support the idea vigorously after the GOP won two-thirds
control of the state Legislature in 1991.

Should Mr. Schundler pull off an upset, the new conventional
wisdom will no doubt be that such a conservative candidate
can't win in the fall against Democrat Jim McGreevey, who
almost toppled Ms. Whitman four years ago. But should Mr.
Schundler defeat a candidate backed by almost all of his
own party's establishment, he will have solidified a reputation
as a giant-killer. After all, no one had heard of him before
1992, when he became mayor of a city in which only 6% of
voters were Republicans. Mr. Schundler went on to win
re-election twice. You can never count out a man with that
kind of
record.

06/06/01: Memo to conservatives: Ignore McCain and maybe he'll go away05/29/01: Integrity in Politics? Hardly. Jim Jeffords is no Wayne Morse05/22/01: Davis' answer to California's energy crisis? Hire a couple of Clinton-Gore hatchet men05/07/01: Prematurely declaring a winner wasn't the networks' worst sin in Florida04/23/01: How to fix the electoral process --- REALLY!04/11/01: A conservative hero may mount a California comeback 03/30/01: Can the GOP capture the nation's most closely balanced district?03/09/01: Terminated 03/06/01: Leave well enough alone 02/22/01: Forgetting our heroes02/15/01: In 1978 Clinton got a close look at the dangers of selling forgiveness02/12/01: Clinton owes the country an explanation --- and an appology02/06/01: How Ronald Reagan changed America01/16/01: Why block Ashcroft? To demoralize the GOP's most loyal voters 01/15/01: Remembering John Schmitz, a cheerful extremist12/29/00: Why are all Dems libs pickin' on me? Dubya's 48% mandate is different than Ford's 12/13/00: Gore would have lost any recount that passed constitutional muster 11/13/00: The People Have Spoken: Will Gore listen? 10/25/00: She's really a Dodger 09/28/00: Locking up domestic oil? 09/25/00: Hillary gives new meaning to a "woman with a past"09/21/00: Ignore the Polls. The Campaign Isn't Over Yet